


Unbroken

by Uchihas_rose



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Mentions of Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29752983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Uchihas_rose/pseuds/Uchihas_rose
Summary: Pulling a trick out of Edgar Allan Poe's books does not work with Jim Moriarty. Sebastian does not even know why he is surprised anymore. After all, the Army will always be a part of him.
Relationships: Sebastian Moran/James Moriarty





	Unbroken

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics used from "Unbroken" by Jon Bon Jovi

Part I

_I was born to be of service_

_Camp Lejeune just felt like home_

_I had honor, I found purpose_

_Sir, yes, sir, that's what I know_

He should have known it was not a good hiding place. Hiding a letter between letters might have worked for an imbecile American author like Edgar Allen Poe, but it most definitely did not work on Irish criminal masterminds, especially not on a man like bloody James Ciaran Moriarty.

Sebastian sighed deeply in resignation, looking at the empty pompous envelope laying on the table, before turning his gaze to the equally fancy looking letter it had contained, held by Jim’s pale, slender fingers.

“Are you aware that opening another person’s private letters is a felony?”

A dark brown eye and a tuft of black hair appeared from behind the paper – or was it parchment? -, scrutinizing Sebastian with a look of uttermost pity and disinterest for a moment, before the eye turned back on the letter.

“First of all, it was already open. Second of all, if you don’t want people to read your letter, you have to come up with something better than just stacking it into a bunch of unopened business mail. You really should know better than to do that. We might actually receive something interesting by postal once in a while. If someone can be bothered to voice their request in a good, old-fashioned letter instead of today’s much more common but boring electronic mail or text messages, it is bound to be thoroughly examined sooner or later. Especially if there’s absolutely nothing else to do. Plus, hiding a letter between letters is a very poe-sque action, very American and therefore, horribly distasteful and to be scorned at, wouldn’t you agree?”

“First of all, liar. Second of all, would it kill you not to be such a bloody, insufferable know-it-all all the time?”

Jim looked up from the letter once again, shrugging his shoulders.

“The possibility of that is highly probable.”

Sebastian groaned, rolling his eyes.

“Sometimes, I envy Watson. Living with a wall-shooting, dress robe-wearing, cocaine-headed consulting smart-ass seems so much less complicated than living with a fire-starting, Westwood-wearing, snooping consulting criminal!”

Jim remained unimpressed by the comparison, folded the letter and stuffed it back into the envelope.

“Do you intend to go?”

“Moving in with the easy city life doctor and the curly haired smart-ass? I am seriously thinking about it.”

“Absolutely hilarious and you’re more than welcome to do so, if you think you’re better off at Baker Street, but not what I was referring to.”

“Well, at least Mrs Hudson’s cookies are actually edible and not also usable to beat someone’s head in if you happen to be out of rocks, so it might be worth considering-”

“Will you stop deliberately avoiding my question?”, Jim interrupted, the brown eyes suddenly very sharp and piercing.

Sebastian involuntarily shifted around nervously, looking at his feet.

“I do not intend to go.”

“Why?”

Sebastian exhaled deeply, rolling his eyes.

“Why should I? I am not longer in the Army, remember? I am retired. I have no further obligation to Queen and country, and I see no necessity in going there. Nobody wants me there, anyways. Sending the letter is a mere formality they have to do because I actually served at the 1st Bangalore Pioneers and happened to rise to the rank of Colonel, before they realised I was not the picture book presentable soldier they hoped for. For some reason, they do not consider you acceptable for active service anymore when you actually get a taste for killing and for some reason, it’s okay to kill a bunch of people on the other side, but not your own, even if said people are the most insufferable bunch of green, idiotic boys the war has ever seen. They were as good as dead anyways! Had they been horses, it would’ve been absolutely fine to shoot them!”

He glared at the letter, full of scorn and disgust.

“You know, they teach you how to kill, but once you actually develop a taste for it, you’re a psycho and a mental hazard and they have to find a way to get rid of you. Retirement is what you get when they don’t want you anymore, but also have no plausible cause for dishonourable discharge! Does that answer your question of why I do not intend to go? I am better off with you than Her Majesty’s Royal bunch of neatly groomed, ball less kiss asses!”

Jim just raised an eyebrow, reaching behind the couch and pulled out an item of clothing Sebastian knew all too well, packed neatly into a clothing bag. He groaned.

“No. For the love of fucking hell, no! How the bloody shit did you even found it?”

He had thrown that god damned uniform away, hadn’t he? On the other hand, though, he wouldn’t put it past Jim to actually hunt down his uniform. He knew the other had kind of a military kink, so he didn’t even know why he was surprised. Why did anything Jim did surprise him anymore?

Jim just smiled, oddly resembling the bloody Cheshire cat.

“Darling, please. You should know me better than that.”

Sebastian groaned, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“You are unbelievable! And that is not a compliment. You are completely insane!”

Jim didn’t look very impressed, just held up the clothing bag, until Sebastian, glaring at Jim with all the distaste he could muster, grabbed the bag and vanished to their bedroom to put the cursed thing on. Of course, it wasn’t just some kind of replica, but his actual uniform, from the hat down to the shoes which still bore his initials on the inside.

Sebastian sighed. No, he really didn’t know why he was surprised anymore…

He hesitated for a moment, looking at his reflection in the mirror. He had grown a bit older, his hair was longer and the scar on his face had actually been a wound the last time he had worn it, but otherwise, Sebastian felt just like the old days, preparing to parade in front of Buckingham Palace to receive a medal for blowing some poor bastard’s brains out with his rifle.

His shoulders heaved in a deep sigh.

He had always hated this sort of fight, feeling much more comfortable in the field, where the actual action took place and he could lie in wait for hours, motionless, scooping his next target, making no difference between a hostile soldier or a stalking tiger.

Mockingly, he saluted his reflection, watching it copy the movement, before he turned his back to the mirror and shut the door behind him.

Back to battle it was, then… And to his own personal hell.

Part II

_Today twenty-two will die from suicide_

_Just like yesterday, they're gone_

_I live my life for each tomorrow_

_So their memories will live on_

“Tell me again, why are you dragging me along with you?”, Jim asked.

“I didn’t”, Sebastian responded, “you are the one dragging me to go there in the first place. I said I did not want to go. But I do not want to suffer at the celebration on my own, so if I have to suffer, so do you.”

Jim grumbled, bumping his head against the back of his seat.

“That’s... Mean.”

“Yeah”, Sebastian agreed, “it’s a criminal action. We’re running a criminal organisation, in case you have forgotten. It’s your fault we’re going there, in the first place. Why do you even want to go? You will get bored. You will be bored out of your mind.”

Jim shrugged.

“Don’t worry about me. I have a Cluedo app. And, well...”, he eyed Sebastian up and down with a sly smirk on his lips, “there is just something about a man in an uniform.”

Sebastian sighed deeply, rolling his eyes

“I can’t believe you force me to go to this celebration I really don’t want to go to, just because you’re obsessed with my uniform. You couldn’t find some other reason to get me to wear it?”

Jim just shrugged again, showing no sign of feeling even remotely guilty.

“I might have been able to, but this just lined up perfectly.”

Sebastian sighed, rolling his eyes.

“Next time, I just burn the letter the second it arrives.”

“So you can teach an old cat new tricks”, Jim exclaimed in delight and Sebastian growled.

“Shut up now, you Irish criminal leprechaun.”

Jim’s nose scrunched up.

“Last time, it was a goblin.”

“Next time, it’ll be a kelpie”, Sebastian promised, glancing out the window.

The car had stopped and a man in a tuxedo was opening the door, greeting them politely.

Sebastian suppressed a sigh, following Jim out of the car. He hated celebrations, especially those kinds of celebration.

What was there to celebrate anyways?

The celebration was even worse than Sebastian had feared. The room was packed with people and he could feel Jim winch slightly next to him. He rolled his eyes. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to take Jim along after all. He knew that Jim normally thrived in crowds like this, that he loved the military to some kinky extend – but this was neither kinky, nor business, so there was no pleasure in it, which made Jim very irritable.

“You wanted to go”, he reminded Jim quietly, his eyes already focusing on the nearest exit and the easiest ways to get there. It was a force of habit, something he had brought along with his Army past as well as his marksmanship and he liked it much less.

He shook his head slightly, inhaling deeply, calming himself. It was such a weird feeling to see all of those people again...

Next to him, Jim made a strange sound and Sebastian glanced at him, arching an eyebrow.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well...”, Jim’s eyes moved around the room, lingering on the people present, “you said this was a celebration service intended to the former members of the 1st Bangalore Pioneers and some other troops who’ve been to India, right?”

“That’s right”, Sebastian confirmed, not quite getting Jim’s point, “so?”

The brown eyes glided once more across every person inside the room.

“Without being hurtful or tactless – where, exactly, are those troops? There are some politicians, the Prime minister, a bored to death and grumpy looking Iceman, some member of the Royal family or at least a spokesman for them, but otherwise-“

Jim stopped in the middle of the sentence when a man wearing the same uniform as Sebastian spotted them in the crowd and headed over to them, beaming from ear to ear.

“Bash fucking Moran! As I live and breathe!”

Sebastian couldn’t help but accept the huge grin spreading on his face.

He let go of Jim’s hand to embrace the other man into a big hug.

“I could say the same!”, he replied, letting go of him after a short while, “haven’t seen you in forever, Brandon!”

Brandon laughed heartily, punching Sebastian’s shoulder in a friendly manner.

“Why, look who’s talking! You were the one who fell off the face of the earth! No one has heard anything of you since you retired. Some of the guys used to think you had taken a gun and blow your brains out! It’s the first time in ages anyone has seen or heard of you, in ages!”

Sebastian’s lips twitched into something like a smile.

“Nah, you know me. I am a tough brick. I don’t break easily.”

“That’s probably true”, Brandon agreed, his eyes skimming over Sebastian’s appearance, “you never were as effected by all the shit happening around us as the others.”

Sebastian said nothing. That was not what he had expected to hear from his old friend. Even worse, he couldn’t even disagree or say it was wrong.

The war hadn’t marked him the way it had other people. He knew that soldiers usually were required to see a therapist after an attack, but he had always avoided that. He had never seen any need. He knew that suicide of soldiers after their first charge was normal; it hadn’t been any different with his unit. But for some reason, Sebastian had never suffered from nightmares. He wasn’t haunted by the faces of the men he had killed. He didn’t wake up screaming and covered in sweat at night. He never had – and once the Army had kicked him out, he had tried to find a way to continue the need of killing he had felt, since hunting tigers had not been enough after getting a taste of hunting humans…

Sebastian looked at Jim who had examined the buffet and was now giving Mycroft a cheery wave and smile, while the other’s face was growing even more tense. He hadn’t known that to be possible.

“Colin is dead, you know”, Brandon said, making Sebastian turn his attention back to his former comrade, “just a few days ago. He became addicted to Heroin after and eventually…”

He shrugged his shoulders, his eyes shadowed by the death of their mate.

“There aren’t that many left of us. The 1st Bangalore Pioneers, I mean. I don’t know how it’s looking with the other units, but of ours… I think it’s just you and me now.”

Brandon laughed bitterly, pulled a flask from his side and took a sip.

“That’s why it’s so good to see you. Funny, eh? You were actually the first to retire. What are the odds that you’ll be last one left when we’re all gone?”

Part III

_Once we were boys and we were strangers_

_Now we're brothers and we're men_

_Someday you'll ask me "Was it worth it_

_To be of service in the end?"_

_Well, the blessing and the curse is_

_Yeah, I'd do it all again_

Jim was unusually quiet on their ride home after the party. Sebastian couldn’t remember having seen much of Jim once he had finished his talk to Brandon. Matter of fact, he had actually just wanted to avoid people, but he had still done his best to maintain at least a halfway polite smalltalk to everybody who had approached him – except for Mycroft, whom he had hadn’t bothered to make conversation with.

“Did you have fun?”, he asked when the silence in the car became too much for him to bear, “do you want to go to the next one as well?”

He got no answer. Concerned, Sebastian turned around, nudging Jim gently.

“Hey, are you alright? Jim?”

Jim just continued to stare out of the window, his profile unmoving and betraying no emotion when it got lit by the streetlights they passed on their drive back to Conduit Street.

“James?”, Sebastian asked, concern fluttering in his stomach all of a sudden. He had never known Jim to be this quiet…

Again, he grabbed the other man’s shoulder, shaking him slightly, but he still got no response. Sebastian started to get seriously worried.

Had Mycroft done something to Jim at the celebration? He wouldn’t put it past the Iceman, but there had been a lot of people. Surely, not even Mycroft would have dared…?

The car stopped and before he could say or do anything further, Jim had opened the door and made his way to their home. Sebastian had no other option but to follow him and hope that Jim would be more willing to talk once they were in the safety and quietness of their residence.

Sebastian shut the door to their apartment behind them, sitting down on the couch. He could hear Jim rummaging in the kitchen and a few moments later, Jim sat down next to him, two glasses of whisky in his hand. Sebastian took one of them and sipped the golden liquid slowly.

“Why did you never tell me?”, Jim asked after a while in which they both had sipped their whisky and neither of them had talked.

Sebastian’s brows furrowed.

“Told you what?”

“When you first came here, I deduced that you were addicted to danger – it wasn’t that difficult to see, any fool could have noticed – but you never talked to me about your time in the Army. You never talked to me about your regiment. Matter of fact, you never talk about anything that happened while you were still serving at the Pioneers. Why is that? Are you embarrassed? Is it painful for you to talk about it? I’ve been watching your sleep pattern – it’s undisturbed. How come? You were in the thick of battle and still, there is no trace of any post traumatic disorder. This leaves two possibilities: You are either very good at hiding your triggers or you simply don’t have any.”

Sebastian had not been prepared for Jim to analyse his entire military career, so he just stared at him blankly for a while, waiting to process what Jim had said.

“Do I have to have any?”, he asked eventually, arching an eyebrow, “is it something like an achievement that I’ve never heard of before? I am doing much better without them, though, thank you very much. Plus – what’s the big deal? It’s not like what I am doing now is much different from that. Nothing has changed. I get orders. I follow them. The only difference is that your orders make a lot more sense than the ones I’ve gotten from the Army. I have just one person above me instead of many and I still get to command people and do what I do best.”

He held Jim’s gaze steadily, no blinking while he spoke: “I get to kill. Which is literally the only thing I care about. I am not a moral person, Jim, you know that. There’s no religious bullshit or anything, no conscious. You have your sums to believe in and I have… sensations.”

Jim watched him in silence, staring at him absently.

“You’ve never left the war, have you?”, he asked quietly.

Sebastian shrugged.

“Dunno. Maybe. Maybe I never knew anything else. Maybe that’s what I was made for. I am still a soldier, after all. I am just serving a purpose more fitting my needs.”

“We are all soldiers, Basher”, Jim responded softly, “we are all soldiers in a war whose true size we don’t know and never can comprehend. Life is a war – from beginning to end. We are all born as soldiers to fight a losing battle.”

“Very inspirational”, Sebastian said sarcastically, “you should work as a motivation speaker. I would suggest you’d keep your day job, though. Whether that means your criminal empire or your little professorship at the university is up to you.”

“Is that why you didn’t want to go?”, Jim asked, completely ignoring anything Sebastian had said, “because you feel guilty? Is that why you threw the uniform away? Because it reminded you that the battle will never be over?”

Sebastian groaned.

“No. Stop interpreting me. I hate it when you do that. I thought only idiots deduced and speculated!”

“Only an idiot would believe it was possible to get the war out of men”, Jim returned briskly, “you can get men out of the war, but you will never remove the war from the men. I realised that today.”

He looked at Sebastian, something untypical shimmering in his eyes – regret.

“I should not have made you go. I am sorry.”

Sebastian just shrugged.

“It can’t be changed now, can it? I’ll just make sure to burn the bloody letter next time.”

Jim ran a hand over Sebastian’s arm, his eyes glistening slightly.

“As long as you don’t burn the uniform with it…”

Sebastian couldn’t help but roar in laughter.

“You bloody kinky kelpie!”

Jim just acknowledged the insult with a shrug and Sebastian shook his head, still smirking broadly.

There was no way he’d ever leave Conduit Street. Not for all the cookies Mrs Hudson could make, no matter how delicious they were.

This was the place he was meant to be and, hell, he could openly and honestly say that there was not a single thing in his life he regretted. From beginning to end, he’d live his life to its fullest, not ever looking back.


End file.
